Last December we had our Yes Face CD release festival at Links Hall. I say festival, because that is what it felt like. The atmosphere was full of celebration, and we had four thoughtful and talented artists perform their responses to our CD. It filled me up until I overflowed, and I came onstage all grateful and shaky, but had to pull it together for our sets. We played all of the songs live, in order, and Beau told the most beautiful and simple love story I've ever heard, and we played an encore of what was then a new song full of affection and blue language. One of the best nights of the year for me.

I harken back to this evening because in two days we enter back into that building for another show. We will be in the Constellation space this time, rather than Links, but my good feelings extend into those rooms as well. We are playing this time with Chris Schoen, who has his own anthem, Ryan Wright, who is the most relaxed electric guitar wailer-on-er I've ever seen, and Jim Joyce, who I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, but I am confident he is full of delights. Briavael O'Reilly will come out from behind the sound board this time to play trombone with us, and it may be flurrying outside, and there will be just the right kind of holiday cheer to surround us all.

I'll speak for the band for a minute to say that we all hope you can join us. Tickets are available here for only $10. And you know what else is $10? Our CDs, if you come to the show to get 'em.

It's a busy week for The Crooked Mouth, my friends. Beau O'Reilly's latest play, written with Julie Williams—March!—opens on Friday, November 7 at 8:00pm at The Side Project. It features performances by Jenny and Vicki, among many others, and runs Friday through Sunday until December 7. Which is all well and good. Jump on over here for more info and tickets and maps and whatnot.

But then, on Saturday, November 8, after the March! performance in Rogers Park, the Crookeds will high tail it down to Bucktown to open the reunion show of Chicago favorites, The Dysfunctionells, at Gallery Cabaret at 10:30pm. It will be a night to remember, certainly, and we hope you can come along for the ride.

We are playing out quite a bit in the next couple of months, including our first trip to Urbana. I think you should take a gander at our gig page, preferably while you have the calendar app open on your phone so you can plug these dates right on in there.

A lovely and haunting opera by our own Matt Test, starring our own T-Roy Martin. And also featuring T-Roy's secret third band members, Emmy Bean and Chris Schoen. A dark feast for the ears and not to be missed.

SYNOPSIS

A loose-grip mash up of Frankenstein, Noah's Ark, and dilettante epistemology, Rung is an experimental chamber opera about an obsessive recluse building a body for a disembodied voice. The creation may be a failure, but the failure is quite a creation.

"We know a lot of you tried to see us at Las Manos Gallery or Links Hall or the Poetry Foundation but the evil winter got in the way...well now that evil winter is past and it is spring...FRIDAY, May 16 and SATURDAY, May 17th...the Final performances of the 60 STORY ANIMAL: Short Plays of Samuel Beckett performed by Judith Harding and Beau O’Reilly at Jamie O’Reilly’s ROOTS. For reservations call 773-203-7661...in Lincoln Square...On Friday it will be two Beckett’s THIS OLD TUNE and TEXT FOR NOTHING 1, with guest Jim Joyce ...on Saturday, Beckett’s THIS OLD TUNE and TEXT FOR NOTHING 1, with The Crooked Mouth doing a whole set! At the end of the performance Beau will be sixty one and it will be summer ...isn't that all something?...I love most of you most of the time..."— Beau

Our good friend, writer and Theater Oobleck-er Jeff Dorchen, penned a wonderful review of our record for the 2nd issue of Chicago Arts Journal (featuring a rakish photo and drawing of our own Jenny Magnus on the cover). Since CAJ is not online, we offer the review in its entirety below. If you live in Chicago, head over to Quimby's or Chicago Comics or the Prop to get yourself a hard copy. Worth that effort, indeed.

Once upon a time there was an album called Yes Face by the band The Crooked Mouth.

That's how I wanted to begin this review of the album called Yes Face by the band The Crooked Mouth. It's a beginning that would have paid homage to Ada Grey, a young blogger whose theater criticism is well-known to most fringe folks in Chicago. I wanted to begin the way Ada begins because I also wanted to end the way she ends: People who would like this album are people who like asses, wistfulness, losing friends, googling tsunamis, big tits, children, sins, doubt, and shirts.

I've rejected this approach. Ersatz Ada doesn't cut the mustard. Only Ada should do Ada.

Be warned: this review is deeply hued with personal feelings. My desire to channel Ada arose because Chicago's fringe arts scene, with its overlapping communities making up one great society, has grown more important to me since I left it to live in Los Angeles.

For the past half-decade I've retreated into vintage recordings of calypso and Hawai'ian music to get the sound of LA out of my ears, the sound of clamoring for attention. My own clamoring is in that noise, too. I must cower in bed with the blinds closed against the afternoon sun, listening to Lord Executor, Wilmouth Houdini, the Mighty Sparrow and Growling Tiger, or Sol Ho'opi, Sam Ku West, King Bennie Nawahi and Prince Wong to drown out all the zeitgeist-jockeying and my own complicity in it.

Nostalgia for an authenticity that perhaps never was, I guess, is what impels me.

"Authenticity" seems a peculiarly American obsession when it comes to music. It goes back to Alan Lomax's biases and persists in the notion of street cred, but now it's the artists themselves obsessed with projecting authenticity, a depressing enterprise to observe.

The Chicago artists I'm talking about don't strive to be real. Art is their reality. There's a kind of Big Shoulders or just-get-on-with-it way they go about making theater, music, literature, painting and sculpture, whether their subject is fantastical or industrial or – if those two adjectives suggest a spectrum – somewhere in between. I could contrast what they do engage in with the fashionable shtick they eschew, but that's a dissertation unto itself.

When I met Jenny Magnus and Beau O'Reilly we were all wearing black. Or maybe I'm just remembering one day we all happened to be wearing black. If that sounds pretentious, so what? If so, it was authentic pretention. It was the late 1980s. The nation had just come through the moral wood chipper of Ronald Reagan's Morning in America, and in many ways we were all in mourning for America. We were also unconsciously plumbing the depths of a lyric style of Buddhist existentialism. And black was slimming.

Beau and Jenny were a binary star around whom many and various creative projects coalesced. They were a theater company, a band, and a writing/performance core radiating multiple force fields of drama, literature and music all concatenating in spheres. When their romantic partnership came to an end their work never entirely separated. Natural cohesion bound them, like gravity, even where there was friction and agony of influence. Some of the community I still associate with Beau and Jenny's fields of force has dispersed to all parts of the world, but the pair, alone and together, keep replenishing their artistic clusters and birthing new ones. Their new record with their band The Crooked Mouth carries me back to the fertile ground they've never stopped cultivating.

Yes Face is a terrifically good record. It travels on vocal harmonies and drums while it shimmers and jangles with strings. The drumming and bass are great, tempos and sophisticated time signatures change without fanfare, but rather with ease and confidence in a way the body experiences joyfully without having to filter it through the intellect. Sophistication and complexity without over-thinking is part of what makes these songs masterful creations, as compositions and arrangements. Troy Martin, Matt Test and Vicki Walden, the other band members, do backup vocals, strings, bass, brass, piano and accordion, and rotate vocally to the foreground with excellent results.

Jenny and Beau have helped form my taste in music in their capacities as creators and practitioners as well as colony-catalysts. As colony-catalysts they affected the movement patterns of the friends I learned from the most, as those friends flowed into, around and out of Chicago. By "helped form my taste," I mean they and these friends strongly influenced the way I seek music. It's what leads me to listen to early music, my vintage island explorations, Morricone and other soundtrack works, klezmer, bluegrass, mento, Lou Harrison, Texas swing, Ukrainian lute, jump, exotica, Captain Beefheart, Uilleann pipes, New Orleans rock and roll – and it has instilled suspicion of crap that's made only as mass product in a consumer industry, and impatience with anything that bores me.

Dave Van Ronk is a guy I've been listening to in preparation to see the new Coen Bros movie, and I'm struck by similarities between Van Ronk and Beau O'Reilly. Aesthetically, there's an ease in their vocals, which I could call "timbre-forward" in the way Napa cabernets are "fruit-forward," though the vocals are dominated by earth, leather and coffee, which makes them far more pleasant and intriguing than those fruit-bomb wines. The wine analogy is lousy, in fact. I just wanted to say "timbre-forward" because it's accurate and fun.

It's really the only way Beau's and Van Ronk's vocals are similar. Van Ronk was a researched stylist, albeit natural about it. Beau is consistently Beau, having perhaps more thoroughly digested his influences, not separating them one from another into discrete spotlights. He splays high note syllables like Anthony Newley, curls his mid-range around his fingers like a more skillful Allen Ginsberg (whom he once played onstage), and in his lower range can threaten somewhat like fellow Chicagoan Michael Shannon's General Zod. But socially, like Van Ronk, Beau is a mentor, survivor, institution, master craftsman, scholarly artist, and elder statesman. Like Genghis Khan, he is a progenitor. Every couple of years, it seems, I meet someone who claims to be his kid or grandchild, and I take their word for it.

His lyrics are odes and stories in which simple things are attempted and succeed, or fail, or turn out well just because, or succeed despite the tendency of people to fail to be as good as their intentions, or despite their tendency to even fail to have good intentions. He sings with placidity even when cutting loose full-voiced, giving his interpretations detached bemusement interspersed with avuncular admonitions.

The failure of humans to be all they can ideally be, and what's funny and sad about that, and what's fun about the ways they attempt to overcome that failure, is what I enjoy most about Yes Face. It may not be its dominant feature, but it's what I hear most. Listening for it helps me feel the way the music isn't just a medium in which the lyrics flow, but a character against which the lyrics play. Beau and Jenny have always lent themselves to listening this way, even when doing covers.

Where Beau explains methodically, Jenny demonstrates dramatically. Here's a story I made up about Jenny Magnus: I imagine someone at some time told her she thinks too much, and she decided that was a stupid thing for that someone to say, but she's self-critical enough to every once in a while wonder if it's true, and then the fact she has to even wonder that pisses her off. I love that. I know I only made it up, but it feels like Jenny to me. In songs, Jenny lets stuff get to her and then gets to why it gets to her, then reflects on the process with cutting critique that is insightful and often very funny.

Jenny sounds like no other singer, male or female, with a clear, strong voice usually supported with a conviction belying the vulnerability in her lyrics. This Jenny voice has a wisdom that fades till forgotten, then is later rediscovered. It's like a character who never quite learns her lesson because of a mischievous, ill-advised, compulsive curiosity. Her lyrics and singing revel in locating her lost wisdom each time in its new disguise, calling it out and unmasking it. On Yes Face, ornamental glottal stops and yodels are used more sparingly than in her earlier work. It's a purer, less ornamented Jenny, well-set amid ukulele and banjo in the economical ensemble.

Jenny betrays a suspicion that joy, due to its transience, is not to be trusted. Her wit is self-deprecating as it travels toward realization that the world is beautiful despite intellectual protests. She mocks pettiness, rage, shallowness, cowardice, loneliness and schadenfreude even as she, in a certain way, confesses to them. All the while her voice is gathering strength and joy in the act of creating and performing, till at last Jenny enacts a climactic, straight-faced, courageous conquest over the embarrassment of being caught in the act of celebrating passions both admirable and less so.

Vicki Walden's vocals achieve a similar ouroboros loop when fronting the track "Wah Wah Wah," not with conviction undercut by uncertainty, as in Jenny's case, but with an optimistic sincerity undercut by mocking lyrics that can border on the sardonic. In songs where she's called upon to blend, she fleshes harmonies out beautifully, balancing Jenny's no-bullshit delivery and Beau's clean storytelling with something like hope that maybe a little sweetness might be tolerated if only to make the trip down the rough road of self-recognition a little easier.

What is this music? One felt Kurt Weill's influence in Jenny and Beau's previous, protean and long-lived ensemble, Maestro Subgum and the Whole (whose complete box set came out this past year), or maybe the influence was Brecht himself. Maestro wandered around stylistically in folk, rock and – being theater-makers as well as musician/songwriters – cabaret. Back then I called their music "art song," a term I learned at KlezKamp, which was a kind of klezmer boot-camp and Jeebus there's really no room to explain what any of that is right now.

Maestro's arrangements were always brilliant. The Crooked Mouth's are, too. Divergent styles and the contributions of varying songwriters doing many musical duties somehow don't mess up the coherence. This band is a thing far less elaborate than Maestro at the height of its layered complexity. The Crooked Mouth cuts its own groove. Maybe it's a shorter distance between two points. Where Maestro was a beast, the Crooked Mouth is its own critter, albeit with Beau and Jenny's genes clearly evident.

The Crooked Mouth, although its fiber is country/folk, still bears the influence of theater. However, their country and folk, whatever those categories have come to mean or not mean, don't sound like musical theater people doing country and folk, imitating tropes and making sure to hit hallmarks as if ticking them off on a laundry list. Troy Martin and Matt Test pluck and strum their stringed boxes in accordance with the nature of the instruments, not according to a Way They're Supposed To Be Used In This Genre. Troy's vocals on a song like "Ghost Cat" are earnest and in the moment, and if the lyrics happen to be particularly good, they don't come off as clever in that musical-theater-composer-aping-a-genre way. They're just really good lyrics. Though far more typical in alt country than the radio-ready garbage coming out of Nashville, really good lyrics are allowed in country music.

But this isn't alt country. This isn't alt folk. This is art song in that the songs are works of art. Contemporary folk? That makes sense, if we need a genre name to make sense out of music. And I guess we do. Genres have become micro-exact these days. There are people who can tell the difference between reggaeton and dancehall, or brostep and dubstep. Apparently thousands, even millions. God bless those scientists of musical taxonomy. So let The Crooked Mouth be contemporary folk. They're contemporary and they're folks.

It's astounding how little fuss The Crooked Mouth make about their influences. They may quote, they may make the odd pop-culture reference here and there, but not in a grandstanding way. I call this astounding because they seem to draw from an endless well of sources, yet their songs are untainted by the dystopian shopping mall pressing in on us from our ever-more-interactive communication screens. If anything, Beau and Jenny seem to have grown more effortlessly independent of the self-validating spectacle.

These are music-makers with the natural bent to realize good songs. Melody and lyric come together in beautiful, often unusual ways without clutter or extraneous decor. The focus here is on the craft of making interesting melodies and writing lyrics that are well-written simply because that's how a good writer approaches a lyric. Contrast this with so much of pop and even indie rock music where the goal seems to be to have things happen four times.

Where everything on the record comes together for me – remember my warning at the top about deeply hued with personal et cetera – is in The Crooked Mouth's rendition of "Venice" by Diane Izzo, from her first record, One. Diane was a friend of ours, a brilliant singer/songwriter we lost to cancer in early 2011. She was one in that orbit of concatenating colonies, whose career was nurtured by Beau and Jenny and their collaborators at the wonderful, wonderfully ambitious folk/jazz club they ran for a while, the Lunar Cabaret.

Diane's version of "Venice" is Diane's, and I'm not reviewing her album, though I urge you to buy it.

Crooked Mouth's "Venice" begins with ukey, mandoliny-sounding strumming reminiscent of the intro to Led Zeppelin's "Going to California." I don't know if the Venice Diane wrote about was Venice, California, but that's how I read it in Crooked Mouth's version. She did have her issues with Los Angeles when she came out to make a career, so she set a more independent path after that.

The anthemic treatment "Venice" gets from the Crooked Mouth ensemble, then, resonates powerfully with me. Beau's vocals lead, with Jenny featured and harmonizing crisply, and the other lovely voices fleshing out the majestic melody. It's one of the most gorgeous things I've ever heard. Everything I've written above about the virtues of their musicianship and the play of vocal against lyric manifests in this song, while yet a further complexity weaves through. The song is about memory and youth and camaraderie and loss. It's about realizing later you weren't as wise as you'd thought, yet mourning the loss of that naïve approach, whatever trouble it might have led you into.

So they're singing about a great deal when they're singing Diane's song. It's an anthem and an ode.

In Los Angeles and New York, the pop music establishment, like the movie industry, is trying to hold the same territory even as the tectonic plates of progress are slipping the old foundations out from under its feet. It seems odd that our mass-media Cult of Youth, begun in the 1950s, persists despite the passage of the Baby Boomers into middle age. It would be nice if we could drag the culture some distance into maturity in our wake, rather than wallow with it in the stagnant infantilization of taste.

Fortunately in the rest of the world most music reaches its audience onstage and through the web, and that audience is looking beyond the parochial horizons of yesterday's corporate command economy. Listening habits continue to broaden despite the waning Giant Label industry's attempts to shrink our horizons with an increasingly homogenous commercial radio spectrum. Music creation has become decentralized, as it was for most of human history, I guess. The Crooked Mouth's Yes Face is a good example of how, when artists fully inhabit the world outside corporate circumscription and take as a given the freedom to do so, the art they make can be mature yet still startle with fresh discoveries.

From our label, uvulittle: We are now accepting pre-orders for Yes Face, the second CD by Chicago's The Crooked Mouth.

All pre-orders will ship by Nov 25. Digital ships instantly and we're including the mp3 version for all pre-order orders.
Yes Face picks up where their debut ended. A little less country, perhaps.. First, though, the recording is lovely. Simple, complex, beautiful... It breathes. Deeply. As expected, the vocal arrangements are well conceived and executed flawlessly by people with an obvious passion for such perfections. The instrumentation is tasteful - bringing banjo and bluegrass sounds to folky show tune-y (almost) rock numbers. There's a nod to the blues in there, too. Fun, serious, sad and furious. Actually, quite transcendent.

Treat yourself to some songs (there's 20 of 'em on there!) by one of Chicago's most creative musical outfits.

The official release party is on December 7 at Links Hall. See our Gigs page for more info.

The show is something of a reunion because 35 years ago Andrew Calhoun, Folksinger, met Beau O’Reilly across the street at the legendary JUICY JOHN PINKS where Beau was doing the booking.

Andrew is touring to support his new album and Beau will be playing with his band The Crooked Mouth who are just about to release their new cd, YES FACE, on uvulittle records. Beau, known somewhat for his theater and radio work on This American Life, has been working musically, for about 5 years with the multi instrumentalist Matt Test, the ethereal voiced Troy Martin on guitar and uke, the bass-playing fine harmonizer Vicki Walden and the eponymous lead singer and drummer Jenny Magnus, with whom Beau shared the drivers seat in Maestro Subgum and The Whole. If any of this rings a bell and you like well-made songs written by people who care about stuff and have a sense of humor, come out and hear us on Tuesday October 8th at 8 o'clock at the House Cafe in DeKalb.

If it's a dorkish thing to drive around listening constantly to your own band's CD, then I am the biggest dork there is. I can't get enough of this record that we are so very close to completing. It's called Yes Face and that is, in fact, the face I am making behind the wheel of my car as the songs go round and round. I hope that you all will like it as much as I do. Soon, my pets, soon a November or December release date will be confirmed on these very web pages. In the meantime, for your listening pleasure, here is the version of Spite that appears.

We could not be happier to join Mistress of Ceremonies Jamie O'Reilly at her fourth annual Roots Fest this weekend. There are a host of talented O'Reillys and their cohorts on the musical bill, and no finer backyard venue in which to see them.

Click on that lil' linky up there for more info. We toast you with a frosty beverage in advance.

The Crooked Mouth had an epic weekend of recording, with its petty trials, travails, and yes, triumphs. Looks like the next record is going to have 20 tracks on it. That's a lot o' material to get through, but we have succeeded in recording nearly everything. It is onto the mixing now. We're cautiously hopeful that all will be finished for a May time Beau/Jenny birthday bash release.

The Crooked Mouth waves goodbye to Rhino 2013 on Sunday, February 17th at 7:00pm, not the previously boasted about Sunday afternoon.

What does that mean?
The show's at 7.

When is it?
It's at 7:00!!!

Is John Starrs still in the afternoon?
Why yes he is, he just starts a little later, around three thirty.

Will Scott Vehill be with John?
Why yes he will.

When's The Crooked Mouth?
IT'S AT SEVEN.

Can I do everything on Sunday, the closing day, that I want to do?
Why yes you can, I think you can, I hope you can.

Did the rhino brain trust cause this schedule flux on purpose just to test my commitment to the project?
No, they didn't. They are working night and day, using all the tools god gave them to make it work out for you and yours.

Can I trust the accuracy of this news?
Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Will they play anything special for me?
We think they will, we know they will...so say we all.

Now through February 17, the Rhino thunders on at the Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston.

The Crooked Mouth is involved on many levels:
Beau and Jenny revisit the Madras Parables with "All the Ways to the Hidey Hole" on Friday and Saturday nights;
Matt provides music for Sue Cargill's "Lizzie Borden is Smashing";
Troy is in the latest work from The Billy Goat Experiment, "Breath Boxes"; and
Vicki is part of the staged reading of Barrie Cole's new play, "Clumsy Sublime" and curated the Rhino-inspired art show in the lobby.

As ever, the Rhino is chock full of excellent fringe theater. Go to the website for details!

You likely know this already, but Matt and Troy have another band, a band that was a show and is now a band, Elvisbride. Their music is as excellent as the people involved: smart, funny, entertaining, and tight. We are delighted to be opening for them (with Darcy Lynn and Belmondos) as they headline Double Door on Tuesday, Feb 5 at 8pm. There will be staff manning the water stations keeping Troy and Matt liberally supplied with energy gel squeezy packets as they navigate two shows in one night.

Opening this Friday, The Other Side of the Elephant: Short Plays by Curious Writers features contributions from all of our band members. Vicki, Matt, and Troy are on the Friday night bill, with Summer of '76 and Birthday Boy (respectively written by Vicki and Matt with Chris Bower). Beau and Jenny have written/are directing and performing on the Sunday bill, with Advanced Placement, Crowns, and Rhino Tails: New Work by SAIC Students.

See the link above for more details and a full schedule. All shows are at Prop Thtr, and tickets are $15 or pay what you can. Running through June 10. There is a lot of energetic new work present here—don't miss it.

We really did have an excellent time playing at the Ace Bar last week. What a treat to have an actual sound guy, and let Matt be banjo/piano/accordion player without the added burden of engineering. He is a man of many talents. Jenny recorded us on the ipad balanced atop her drum kit, so maybe we'll be posting some of it if sound quality merits.

But on to the future! Saturday night, we are playing with our good friends, King Pignacious at Center Portion. It's an early May Day fundraising effort for the Occupy Chicago Defense Fund. We honor their commitment to the 99%, and are glad to show our support. This should be an excellent, excellent time, so we hope you can join us.

Spring is sprunging all over the place, and we are playing all over the place. We are so pleased about our special guests this go round—it behooves you, you, to come and see. The first three gigs listed here are at Center Portion, and the last is at Ace Bar. Exciting.